


dear sinner, please speak your name

by superstarrgirl



Category: NCIS
Genre: F/M, I dont really know what this writing style is, Spoilers for most of Ziva's time on NCIS, and obviously spoilers for s13, but i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-05
Updated: 2016-07-05
Packaged: 2018-07-21 17:25:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7396696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superstarrgirl/pseuds/superstarrgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You should not have come.” She breathes into the dusty air, bitter with blood and vengeance. </p>
<p>(She’ll say these words years from now, in a house that isn’t hers, and she won’t mean them, but she’ll say them. Lying is safer than letting him in again.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	dear sinner, please speak your name

**Author's Note:**

> Hey there! I know I haven't posted in ages :( but there's nothing like your bae leaving your show to get your ass into gear. i don't really know what to consider this writing because it's a bit all over the place but I really like it, so I hope you guys do too! Enjoy!! xx
> 
> ps. i know it ends really suddenly but there was really nowhere else for me to go with it  
> pps. yes i know ziva is still alive but it's more poetic at least for this story :)

She watches the plane take off the runway, feels her father step up beside her and put a hand on her neck. No words are exchanged, but the silence is deafening. 

(Later, in his office, she’ll storm in in a rage and slam her badge down on the desk. “You want loyalty?” She’ll scream, pushing the badge toward him with such anger that it will slide off the desk and onto his lap. “There’s your loyalty, _Abba_.” 

She’ll storm out, hatred and anger weighing heavy on her shoulders. She won’t care – she has no loyalty left to give.)

Blind loyalty and trust is what kept Ari close – growing up, Ziva swore that she would stick by her family no matter what, that she would be like Ari. That she would keep her father proud and their family name strong.

Tali was sixteen years old when she died – Abba did not bat an eyelid, so neither did Ari. Ziva sat Shiva, but only for as long as Abba would allow. After all, Mossad duties did not stop because a person you loved died. 

“Do you not feel any remorse?” She had demanded of Ari one evening. “She was our _sister_ , Ari!”

Ari had whipped around, a glint in his eyes unlike anything Ziva had ever seen. “No.” He had snarled. “She was _your_ sister.” 

(The monster in Ari was born that night – but it was only years later, watching him bleed to death on Leroy Jethro Gibbs’s basement floor, that she realized it.)

There are nights on the Damocles where she’ll wake in a blind panic, hand reaching under to pull out her gun. She’ll aim it at the darkness, flick the safety, wait to hear the creak of floorboards or to feel hot breath on her cheek. It never comes, but the ghosts float around her room, waiting for her to drift off to sleep so they can dive into her and rip her apart, piece-by-piece. 

So, instead of sleeping, she prays. 

The Hebrew prayers are jarring on her tongue, and they taste like metal, but they come spilling out, words tumbling over each other. Her favorite as a child was the Chanukah candle lighting – Ari, Tali and she would rotate out each evening growing up, but when guests would come for celebration, Ziva was always the one to sing.

(“You have a lovely voice, my little songbird.” Ima used to say. Abba would nod, and Ziva would glow with pride.)

When she’s exhausted her prayers, her mind starts to wander. She thinks of Abby in her lab, testing a new sample with her music blasting. She thinks of McGee at his desk, typing at the speed of knots. She thinks of Gibbs, with his quiet demeanor and kind, old gaze. She thinks of Tony, of his smile that would crinkle his eyes at the corners and his laugh and his gentle smirk.

She wonders if they’re noticing her absence, if they’ve filled her desk. If they’ve filled the hole she created. 

(She sure as hell knows she hasn’t.)

There’s a part of her that really shouldn’t be surprised when the bag is ripped off her head and she’s sitting in front of Tony. There’s a part of her that really _isn’t_ surprised when she finds herself sitting in front of Tony. But the look in his eye, like he’s just seen a ghost – that tells her more than enough. 

“You should not have come.” She breathes into the dusty air, bitter with blood and vengeance.

(She’ll say these words years from now, in a house that isn’t hers, and she won’t mean them, but she’ll say them. Lying is safer than letting him in again.)

After she’s officially reinstated as an NCIS agent, there are three meetings with a therapist dropped on her desk on pink sticky notes. 

She ignores every single one. 

There’s a bar not far from NCIS where they still know her as Gina, and when she sits down at the counter and orders the most expensive wine they’ve got, the bartender looks at her and says, “haven’t seen you in a while. You been alright?”

It sounds genuine, bordering on curious but not probing, but she’s not ready to deal with that. So, she gets up and leaves.

“You feel like you’re carrying the ghosts with you, don’t you?” Tony asks when she gets home to her apartment and he’s sitting on her couch, drinking her beer. Honestly, she’s not surprised.

Not a lot of things that Tony does surprise her, not anymore.

“Excuse me?” She says wearily, snatching the beer out of his hand and drinking the rest of it.

“Ari, Tali, Michael, Kate – you feel like you’re carrying their ghosts. I know I do. Every single one of them.” The question jars her, and slowly she lowers the bottle from her lips. He’s staring at her tabletop, and from this angle, he looks almost childlike. 

“I have carried their ghosts with me since I was a child.” She responds just as softly, and the words fall on hopeless ears.

That night, she kisses him so hard her lips bruise. She wants him to tell her to stop, to push her away. Wants him to tell her how wrong this is, how they’re breaking their boss’s rule. But he kisses her back and tangles a hand in her hair and she hates how this feels good, how this feels _right_.

After, in Tony’s arms, Kate stands by the bedside and watches her. “You disgust me.” She finally hisses cruelly, her dark eyes burning bright. Ziva buries her face in her pillow and sobs herself to sleep.

There is beauty in Paris for the night they are there – there is beauty in a city of light and love. “I could be happy here.” She murmurs, her eyes twinkling in the glow of the Eiffel Tower.

Tony laughs quietly, hunched over a hot chocolate. “You think?” He asks, and it sounds gentle but teasing, just bordering on mocking.

She cocks her head at him, narrows her eyes a bit. “You don’t think I would be?” She questions.

He looks up slowly, and there’s something defensive in his gaze. “I think you could be.” He says slowly, mulling the words over in his mouth. “But I also think that there are some things in DC that you just won’t find in Paris." 

( _Like me_ hangs in the air, forbidden but still there, still audible over the sound of mopeds and coffee cups and words the two of them are too stubborn to say.)

Mike Franks dies, Ziva has a deep cut on her forehead, and all she can hear is _two-rounds-in-a-parked-car_ and all she can see is Mike’s broken body, the bullet hole gaping and bleeding red.  
  
Ziva sobs into Tony’s chest and pretends she doesn’t feel her heart break, because this is as good as it will ever get.

“I do not know how much longer I can do this.” She whispers.

(What she really wants to say is _I don’t know how much more I can lose before I lose you_.)

It’s 2 in the morning and the paperwork is stacking up and there’s a missed call from her father waiting for her at home. But instead, she’s watching Gibbs out of the corner of her eye as he sips coffee. 

When he stands and powers off his computer, Ziva stands too – force of habit. 

“Are you lonely, Gibbs?” She asks, out of curiosity more than anything else.

He stops, shoulders back and a small smile on his face as he turns to look at her. The silence is heavy over them as he surveys her.

(She won’t say it ever, but there are times when she feels that she is more Gibbs’s daughter than Eli’s. Or, rather, there are times when she’d like to believe that the world wasn’t quite as cruel.)

His words are soft, carefully chosen in the dark of a nearly empty bullpen. “You’re never alone when you have kids.” He leans across the small space separating them and presses a kiss to her forehead, lips chapped and comforting. “G’night kid." 

It’s the first time she allows herself to think, really, truly think, that maybe family is more than just blood.

(“You could have called.” She says to Tony years earlier. It’s a white flag, an extending of an invitation that he picks up too late.)

There are parts of the bombing that they don’t talk about, secrets that remain buried. Of these secrets, one of them is Ziva’s:

If she had done her job better, had have checked the car thoroughly, she would have found the bomb. If she had have found the bomb, they wouldn’t have lost anyone. This she knows. She knows that she carries that weight on her shoulders, even if no one chooses to say it.

(‘I would like something permanent.’

Fool, she thinks in that elevator, hair sticking to her forehead and bitter jokes spilling from her lips. Nothing permanent ever remains standing.)

Of these secrets, one of them is Tony’s:

When the bomb goes off, when Ziva tumbles against him, his last thought before the lights go out is that if one of them is to make it out of this alive, he hopes it’s Ziva.

“Your sins are too great.” She says to her father, hot bitter tears dripping from her chin. It’s the last words she’ll say to him, bar a Hebrew prayer pressed into his hair while Tony watches, stills McGee, lets a broken woman lose what little family she had left.

The nightmares are vivid, colorful, terrifying – Tali, blood clinging to her lips as she bleeds. Ari, snarling _you chose them you chose them youchosethem_. Abba, cold and defiant yet pleading, guilty. _Try to understand, Ziva_.

She curls around her pillow, shakes off Tony’s hand and gentle voice. I do not, she thinks. I do not understand why I was not enough.

“At lo levad.”

She pulls away, fingers curling in the hair at the base of Tony’s neck. “I know.” She whispers, because it is what he needs to hear. “I know.” She whispers, because she wants to believe it. “I know.” She whispers.

_(Stop lying_ , she thinks. _I am, I am, I will always be._ )

Israel carries ghosts of a family that Ziva did not know. Tali – 16 and bright and beautiful, innocent, kind, a butterfly whose wings were clipped too soon and too short. Ari – cold and calculating and cruel, brought up in a world that only knew to hate and never to love. Ima never taught him love, because Abba did not allow it.

And then there is Ziva – shadowed, widowed, alone. She bends at the knees at her father’s graveside, his body buried next to Ima’s and Ari’s and the grave that bears Tali’s name but holds no more than an empty box. Her family, she thinks, is peaceful in death. Graves side-by-side, one-by-one, bang-bang-bang-bang.

She wonders, in passing, if there will be a stone beside Abba’s with her name on it. She wonders if she deserves that right, if she is still truly a David, or if she has changed into something that not even she can recognize. 

That little Star hangs from her neck, Tali’s gift two nights before she died. It swings in the dust and wind, fragments light and ghost. It is heavy on her neck.

Before she gets on the plane back to Washington, she takes it off, can feel Tali’s nails in her shoulder and her father’s tight grip on her neck.

(“You are no David.” Her father snarls while she sleeps. “You are no child of mine.” 

“Perhaps I never was.” She replies.)

There was a moment in Paris, all those years ago, where she looked at Tony and some part of her just – just _fit_ , like a lost piece to a puzzle. Like something that had drifted into her bones when she wasn’t paying attention, waiting for something to cling to. 

And Berlin. What difference is Berlin to Paris?

“One day,” her father murmurs, gentle and caring and _fatherly_. “You will dance with a man who will deserve your love.” 

_It’s you_. Ziva breathes into Tony’s shoulder in the din of a Berlin bar. _It’s always been you_.

“You have started a war you cannot hope to finish.” She spits at Bodnar’s feet, watches the words catch alight on the wooden deck of the ship.

He laughs, a cruel and biting sound. “You started this war when you chose _them_.”

“I chose family!” She shouts. “I chose people who love me, people who care about me. You chose war!”

In his eyes, she can see the bloodlust reflected there, that same look she saw in Ari after Tali died. “You chose _weakness_.” He snarls, and lunges. 

(“I am not the weak one.” She says over his body, over the shell that remains of him. “I am the strong one, because I chose what counts.” 

Tony glances around, blue eyes sharp. “You say something, David?”)

She’ll wake some nights in a cold sweat, and the only solace she can find is Gibbs’ basement, the rough drag of sandpaper against her fingertips, the slow, lulling sound of the _scra-scra-scrape_ as she turns something rough into something beautiful, into something worth holding.

Gibbs won’t say much when he finds her, won’t even ask how she got in. He’ll pull the sanding block out of her hand and replace it with something that better suits the grain, matches the movement of the wood. “Make sure you follow the grain.” He says before he retreats back to bed.

(“Never take your eyes off the target.” Ari says. “And stand _straight_.”

She recognizes the sharp point of the gun at her spine, at her neck, at her head, and she straightens and fires.)

The day she places her NCIS badge on the desk in front of Vance, she gets a moment eerily reminiscent of pushing that badge towards her father, cold and sharp as she snaps, “There’s your loyalty.” 

Vance blinks up at all three of them and back to the badges, all gleaming gold and new. “Let me know if you’d like them back.” He says, sweeping them all away. 

(“If someone is lost, we find them.” Anthony DiNozzo snarls, years before, eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, from poring over documents about the Damocles and Mossad and anything he can get his hands on --

Four years later and Ziva hands in her badge and gun and thinks _I’m not lost anymore_.)

At first, with nowhere else to go, she thinks of Paris. Thinks of moments tucked in cafes, of silence and noise and bright lights. But then she thinks of Israel, of Tel Aviv, of the little home in the countryside that bears markings of her age and the scrapes on the wall when Ari couldn’t quite contain his childlike anger. 

_Count to a million_ , Tony says.

_I want to forget you_ , Ziva writes but never sends. _Please just let me forget you._

“You invited me here!” Tony shouts. 

“That was before.” Ziva snaps back, before she can think to stop herself.

“Before what?” He demands, and she has to stop herself from spilling secrets.

“There was a moment,” She whispers into his skin, when he’s asleep. “When I didn’t want you to find me. When I wanted you to forget me. We would have both been safer, happier. We would have both made our own choices and been better off for it.”

“We have made choices, Ziva.” He murmurs. “Each of us has made choices. And I chose you. Time and time again. I’ve always chosen you.”

She doesn’t dare say it, but she’s scared of him in that moment, because he has so much weighing on _you_ , on _choices_ , on _parts of this that neither of us understands_. 

“I’ll change with you.” Tony says, and it’s a plea, she knows what it is. She knows how terrifying a promise like that can be.

_I’m not ready to change_ , she thinks, and watches as he gets on that plane with a Star of David in his pocket and her heart in his hand. 

( _Choices_ , she thinks, years later, as the farmhouse burns around her and Tali cries. _I have made peace with my choices_.)


End file.
